I want to be clear: I love Microsoft Project just as much as the next person that has to throw together random guesses on “duration” and “effort” for tasks that cannot be started for 1-2 months. Even better is the ability with my timesheet to judge how accurate the time estimates are with completely arbitrary estimates of how much time has been spent on a “task”.
If we all put in our arbitrary estimates of completeness on a daily basis, we will have more clarity with which to refine our estimates. Of course, what happens when your programmers are stuck on 80% complete for 4 weeks? Darn that 80/20 rule stuff.
Back to the main point: We have Microsoft Project for tracking project costs and possibly support costs. We supposedly get better clarity if the estimates of work are input on a daily basis. What is the reward? For the worker bee, compliance is rewarded. For the larger team, what is the gain in accuracy from filling out project updates in the timesheet application on a daily vs weekly or monthly basis? I would challenge that the accuracy improvement is minimal, and the decision-making improvement [if any] is unquantifiable.
Meanwhile, the time cost for entering in things in this dog slow application is about 15 minutes–mental distraction plus sitting and waiting plus actual time trying to “accurately” record time. On a daily basis, that’s about 1.25 hours per week. Granted, the weekly time sheet may take 20 minutes to fill out. Catching up for a month might take 25 minutes.
Hmm… 5 hours of cost over a month for daily vs. 80 minutes for weekly vs. 25 minutes for monthly. Granted, the 5 hours per month is about 2.5% of the worker’s time, but is it with to reward compliance [or punish non-compliance] for a 2% decrease in efficiency?
Okay, so that’s splitting hairs? Fine. Let’s take a less time-consuming example: Say you run around on a daily basis and blow an air-horn in every employee’s face in the last hour of the day. How much productivity is lost during the day due to that?